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Data Storage Innovation Conference Speakers

2016 FEATURED SPEAKERS

Camberley Bates

Managing Director and Sr. Analyst, The Evaluator Group

Biography

Camberley joined Evaluator Group as Managing Director and Analyst in 2009 and is responsible for corporate leadership and coverage of go-to-market and channel strategies. She brings over 20 years of executive experience leading sales and marketing teams at VERITAS, GE-Access and EDS. Having crossed the boundaries of vendor sales, channel engagement, and ownership of a 100-person IT services firm, she possesses a unique 360 view for addressing challenges and delivering solutions.

At her previous consulting firm, Bates Strategy Group, she provided Global 250 and startups with go-to-market strategies. As a VP at VERITAS she led a 65-person worldwide marketing team with highly successful lead generation programs and restructuring of the channel. With GE Access, a $2B distribution company, she served as VP of a new division and succeeded in growing the company from $14 to $500 million in revenues through a solution-practice methodology.

She entered the IT field by working with very large data centers as a director and management executive with EDS and IBM. She holds a BS degree in International Business from California State University – Long Beach and executive certificates from Wellesley and Wharton School of Business. Camberley can be contacted at Camberley@evaluatorgroup.com.

Camberley possesses a passion for outdoors and, when not IT driven, she can be found skiing, hiking and riding her bike around Colorado.

Balint Fleischer

Chief Research Officer, Huawei

Biography

At Huawei, as Chief Research Officer of Central Research Institute, Balint is responsible for research and technology planning of future storage among other IT research areas. At Intel, as the General Manager and Director of Architectures for Workstation, Storage and Server platforms was responsible for the mid and long term architecture vision and related pathfinding. Managed the Atom and Xeon server architecture development, including the 3DXpoint related server architecture effort. At Sun Microsystems, as VP and CTO of Networked Storage Group, led the architecture design of next generation storage systems and storage virtualization platforms. As Director and CTO of the Internet Desktop and Server Group was responsible for the architecture development of Sparc based workstations and upto 8 socket Sparc based server products.

Jim Handy

General Director, Objective Analysis

Biography

Jim Handy of Objective Analysis has over 35 years in the electronics industry including 20 years as a leading semiconductor and SSD industry analyst. Early in his career he held marketing and design positions at leading semiconductor suppliers including Intel, National Semiconductor, and Infineon. A frequent presenter at trade shows, Mr. Handy is known for his technical depth, accurate forecasts, widespread industry presence and volume of publication. He has written hundreds of market reports, articles for trade journals, and white papers, and is frequently interviewed and quoted in the electronics trade press and other media. He posts blogs at www.TheMemoryGuy.com, and www.TheSSDguy.com.

Jian Li

Research Program Director, Huawei Technologies

Biography

Jian Li is a research program director and technology strategy leader at Huawei Technologies. He was the chief architect of Huawei's Fusion Insights big data platform. He is currently leading strategy and R&D efforts in IT technologies, working with global teams around the world. Before joining Huawei, he was an executive architect and research scientist with IBM where he worked on advanced R&D, multi-site product development and global customer engagements on computer systems and analytics solutions with significant revenue growth. A frequent presenter at major industry and academic conferences around the world, he holds over 20 patents and has published over 30 peer-reviewed papers. He earned a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Cornell University. He has also hold adjunct or visiting scholar positions at Texas A&M University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University among other similar academic roles. In this capacity, he continues to collaborate with leading academic researchers and industry experts.

Michelle Tidwell

Biography

Michelle Tidwell is Business Line Manager, IBM Spectrum Virtualize, Software Defined Storage, where she is responsible for driving product delivery, sales and strategy around IBM’s Virtualization and Block Storage delivered as Software. In this role, Michelle leverages her 8 years in IBM Storage ISV Alliances and Solution Engineering Management to bring the right application focus in the development of Software Defined Storage solutions.

Michelle was previously responsible for IBM Storage ISV Strategy, and her role included working with Strategic ISVs globally to develop new solutions and business alliances in the area of Storage across a number of vertical segments and cross-industry. Solutions included storage deployed in Clouds, Enterprise Data Centers, as well as MSPs/CSPs. Responsibilities included driving ISV technology investments and integration within the Storage portfolio and taking those solutions to market.

Michelle is a native of San Jose, CA and holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Santa Clara University.

Doug Voigt

Distinguished Technologist, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Biography

Doug Voigt is a Distinguished Technologist in the Chief Technologist’s office of HPE’s Storage Division. He is chair of the SNIA NVM Programming Model TWG and a member of the SNIA Technical Council. Doug has over 36 years of development experience in disk drives, disk arrays, storage management and non-volatile memory. He holds CS and EE degrees from Cornell University and 33 US patents, primarily in virtual arrays.

2016 DSI SPEAKERS

Wayne M. Adams, SNIA Chairman Emeritus

Wayne Adams has over 35 years of IT industry experience spanning business development, technical product/solution management, and partner ecosystems. Wayne has been involved in SNIA leadership roles since 2002. Wayne has served on the SNIA Board of Directors since 2003 including roles as Chairman, Chairman Emeritus, Treasurer in addition to a number of leadership roles for forums and initiatives, conferences, and strategic alliances. He has spoken at numerous industry forums and events.

Over his career, Wayne M. Adams was a Senior Technologist and Director of Standards within the Office of the CTO at EMC, technical alliances partner manager, and a manager of product managers for its portfolio of SRM products. Prior to EMC, Wayne was responsible for product marketing and business development for several strategic software and hardware products at Digital Equipment Corporation. He started his high-tech career at Eastman Kodak as a system designer of real-time control systems.

Wayne has been involved in many industry associations including serving on the DMTF Board of Directors, serving as Advisory Committee member of W3C, contributing to the Industrial Internet Consortium for IoT/big data test-beds, leadership of the Fibre Alliance, and participating with various committees within INCITS, OASIS, Cloud Security Alliance, and TheGreenGrid.

Wayne holds a Bachelor of Science degree with a dual major in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Pittsburgh.

Richelle Ahlvers is Principal Storage Management Software Architect at Broadcom Limited where she defines storage management integrations, solutions, and standards strategies for the Data Center Storage Group. Before joining Broadcom (formerly Avago Technologies), Richelle spent over 20 years in Enterprise Storage R&D teams at HP. While at HP she worked in a variety of technical roles, leading the architecture, design and development of storage array software, storage management software user experience projects including mobility, developing new storage industry categories including SAN management, storage grid and cloud, and storage technology portfolio solutions.

She has led internal and external standards development and worked as a systems architect for large scale storage system projects, with expertise in high availability, scalability and performance system architecture. She has experience leading and managing multiple advanced development and offshore development teams, as well as leading joint university research projects.

Richelle has been engaged with industry standards initiatives with SNIA and DMTF for many years. She currently serves as the Chair of the Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group. She has served as the SNIA Technical Council Chair and on the SNIA Board of Directors and has been engaged across a breadth of technologies ranging from storage management, to solid state storage, to cloud storage, to green storage and more.

Mr Allo has been involved in storage for over 20 years. His experience includes drive development for hard disks, CD's, DVD's and Solid State Devices as well as fiber optic switching between high speed devices and storage media. His diverse background has given him a good understanding of all factors involved in data storage solutions. He is currently the lead in the security engineering solutions group at Seagate in the development and architecture of new and unique methods of secure data storage systems.

On a personal note Mr. Allo has been actively involved in alternative energy production and storage and currently lives completely off-grid.

Tony Barbagallo brings over 25 years of Product Management, Corporate, and Channel Marketing expertise to Caringo. Prior to Caringo, Tony was CMO at Clustrix where he oversaw a product and positioning shift from horizontal scale-out SQL database to focusing on the eCommerce vertical segment. Earlier executive leadership roles included VP of Marketing at Skyera, an enterprise solid-state storage company, where he led all go-to-market activities from stealth to launch; VP of Marketing at GroundWork Open Source, where he developed the company’s freemium business model; Head of Product Management at EVault, one of the first cloud backup SaaS providers; and Group Manager at Microsoft, where he led the Product Marketing and Partner Alliance programs for the Windows CE operating system and tools. He has also held a variety of executive and Marketing positions with Mentor Graphics, Wind River, Sun Microsystems, and General Electric. He holds a BS in Computer Science from Syracuse University and has also completed the Stanford University Executive Program.

Stefan Bernbo is a founder of Compuverde, a software-defined scale-out storage solution. With almost 25 years of experience as a technology ground-breaker, Stefan Bernbo leads his team toward new innovative challenges in data storage. Stefan is an accomplished System and Software Architect and he has designed and built numerous enterprise scale data storage solutions designed to be cost effective for storing huge data sets. From 2003 to 2009 Stefan Bernbo worked within this field for Storegate, the wide-reaching Internet based storage solution for consumer and business markets, with the highest possible availability and scalability requirements.

Furthermore, Stefan Bernbo has worked with system and software architecture on several projects with Swedish giants Ericsson, the world-leading provider of telecommunications equipment and services to mobile and fixed network operators. Stefan Bernbo has been a part of developing several of Ericsson's products and have had numerous international assignments

Olga has being working in the hardware design industry for the last 20 years as Design Engineer, Applications Engineering Manager and now she leads a lean startup which is focusing on how to improve and analyze data produced by systems with NVM technology. The algorithms which company developed allow to optimize the data throughput and create predictive mechanics which allow to forecast the pitfalls in performance, failure analysis and analyze all possible outcomes when it comes to Integrated Solutions.

David Byte is a veteran of the technology business with over 15 years of experience in storage technologies. He has served in roles including IT consultant, SE, CTO and Sr. Technology Strategist. His strength is in identifying the business value of future technologies and helping companies chart a path that helps them implement the technology successfully.

Mark A. Carlson, Principal Engineer, Industry Standards at Toshiba, has more than 35 years of experience with Networking and Storage development and more than 18 years experience with Java technology. Mark was one of the authors of the CDMI Cloud Storage standard. He has spoken at numerous industry forums and events. He is the co-chair of the SNIA Cloud Storage and Object Drive technical working groups, and serves as Chair on the SNIA Technical Council.

Carlos Carrero is a Sr. Principal Technical Product Manager from Veritas and has been working with the Information Management team for the last 15 years in areas such as backup, high availability and storage management. He is an assiduous contributor at Veritas blogs and author of several white papers. He has been working on defining Software Defined Storage solutions for Veritas and more recently on how to apply those technologies to solve persistent storage needs for Containers.

Eric is Senior Director of Marketing at Hedvig. He joins Hedvig from Riverbed, EMC, and Legato Systems where he held marketing and product leadership roles. Eric has a BA in Public Relations from Pepperdine University.

Luis Ceze, Associate Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department, University of Washington

Luis Ceze is the Torode Family Associate Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Washington. His research is on the intersection of computer architecture, programming languages, OS and biology. He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship and the 2013 IEEE TCCA Young Computer Architect Award. He was born and raised in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where it drizzles all the time; he now (mostly) lives in the similarly drizzly Seattle. When he is not working he is found either eating or cooking.

David has served as CTO, CTE, and technology advisor to a number of companies over the years. He has been responsible for leading teams worldwide who share the vision, direction, and future of technology delivered by the companies he has represented. David has invested nearly 30 years in the storage industry, focusing on data protection, data disaster recovery, and business resumption practices for high performance, scale out and scale up storage solutions. He has held several senior level technical positions with companies such as OpenVision (Veritas), ADIC (Quantum), NetApp, Seagate, and ESG (Enterprise Strategy Group), and EMC.

David served as the field CTO for Seagate Cloud Systems and Solutions, establishing the strategic technology vision for the division, and speaking at events worldwide on the topic of cloud systems and 3rd platform solutions, as well as the Global CTO for EMC Emerging Technologies Division. As Senior Analyst and Consultant with the Enterprise Strategy Group, he authored the first market landscape report for Backup as a Service and Replication Technologies for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery.

David has written hundreds of articles, blogs, briefs, and research reports over the years on data storage and big data analytics. His most recent article, “Business at the speed of Insight”, has been published in the April 2016 edition of CIO Review. He is also a published author of the book “Implementing Backup and Recovery,” and has been the Technical Editor of five additional books, published by Wiley & Sons.

David is recognized worldwide as an authority on the subject of big data, data storage, data protection, and business resumption practices. He is an energetic and dynamic speaker who brings a great deal of experiential knowledge, humor, and keen insight to his audience. He has been a featured speaker at several mainstream industry and has served as panelist on various discussions related to storage futures, disaster recovery, compliance, and the data protection strategies. David is a member of a number of technical committees, a passionate entrepreneur, co-founder of ConneXion Spot, co-founder and director of American Wounded Veterans Foundation (Colorado Non-profit), and the founder of The CTE Group, LLC. Follow @davidchapa on twitter for his latest updates.

Dr. Choi leads the Datacenter Solutions Group in Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.'s Memory Solutions Lab. He is primarily involved in the Memory Solutions Lab's Storage Intelligence initiatives including Multi-stream system development and customer engagements. He participates in standards group technical discussions, especially for storage intelligence technology. He has mastered SSD internals, system storage stack, and datacenter solutions. Prior to Samsung, he worked at Cisco systems for nearly six years. His work included mobile and computer networking protocol and architecture, as well as datacenter solutions and cloud computing.

Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates is a widely respected storage analyst and consultant. He has over 35 years in the data storage industry with multiple engineering and management positions at high profile companies.

Dr. Coughlin has many publications and six patents to his credit. Tom is also the author of Digital Storage in Consumer Electronics: The Essential Guide, which was published by Newnes Press. Coughlin Associates provides market and technology analysis as well as Data Storage Technical Consulting services. Tom publishes the Digital Storage Technology Newsletter, the Media and Entertainment Storage Report, the Emerging Non-Volatile Memory Report and other industry reports. Tom is also a regular contributor on digital storage for Forbes.com.

Tom is active with SMPTE, SNIA, the IEEE (he is Director for IEEE Region 6 and active in the Consumer Electronics Society) and other professional organizations. Tom is the founder and organizer of the Annual Storage Visions Conference (www.storagevisions.com), a partner to the International Consumer Electronics Show, as well as the Creative Storage Conference (www.creativestorage.org). He is the general chairman of the annual Flash Memory Summit. He is a Senior member of the IEEE, Leader in the Gerson Lehrman Group Councils of Advisors and a member of the Consultants Network of Silicon Valley (CNSV). For more information on Tom Coughlin and his publications. go to www.tomcoughlin.com.

Rob Davis is Vice President of Storage Technology at Mellanox Technologies and was formerly Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at QLogic. As a key evaluator and decision-maker, Davis takes responsibility for keeping Mellanox at the forefront of emerging technologies, products, and relevant markets. Prior to Mellanox, Mr. Davis spent over 25 years as a technology leader and visionary at Ancor Corporation and then at QLogic, which acquired Ancor in 2000. At Ancor Mr. Davis served as Vice President of Advanced Technology, Director of Technical Marketing, and Director of Engineering. At QLogic, Mr. Davis was responsible for keeping the company at the forefront of emerging technologies, products, and relevant markets. Davis’ in-depth expertise spans Virtualization, Ethernet, Fibre Channel, SCSI, iSCSI, InfiniBand, RoCE, SAS, PCI, SATA, and Flash Storage.

Since 2002, Laurent Denel has been involved in a massive email platform for a major Telco in France (44M mailboxes with 8PB of storage). With several technical and management positions, he’s an expert in managing very large IT deployments. In 2012, for the same client, he co-designed the platform and the migration effort of its Consumer Cloud service (2.4M users with 2PB of storage). He’s also the creator of Redcurrant/HoneyComb, Worldline's custom object storage technology, designed back in 2006 and he has driven the development team until mid 2011. He recently co-founded OpenIO, an open source object storage software vendor.

Michael Dexter has used BSD Unix systems since January, 1991 and appreciates the pre-PC Unix era while looking forward to the coming post-PC one. Michael is the Senior Analyst at iXsystems, Inc. and lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and two children.

John joined SwiftStack as Director of Technology coming from Rackspace where he worked on Rackspace Cloud Files and OpenStack Swift, the large-scale distributed object storage system which SwiftStack is built on. As the Project Technical Lead (PTL) for OpenStack Swift, John is also leading much of its community development efforts.

Before Aberdeen, Craig spent many years at Data General where, among other activities, he directed Data General's internal IT data centers as well as managed the introduction of new analytical tools and business systems. While at EMC, he carried out strategic marketing, competitive analysis, sales force planning, and market forecasting. David is an active member of the SNIA Data Protection & Capacity Optimization (DPCO) Committee.

Pierre Evenou is the CEO and Founder of Rozo Systems, a French storage ISV started in 2010 dedicated to the development of a new high performance and high resilient file storage product named RozoFS. This solution is a pure software solution perfectly aligned to the new challenges of various demanding environments. RozoFS is built on a very unique and innovative erasure coding technology invented at the University of Nantes in France. Previously, Pierre was a research engineer and professor at the University of Nantes for 5 years working on the development of the erasure coding technology embedded in RozoFS. Pierre is now based in California.

Fredrik Forslund serves as Director of Cloud & Data Center Erasure Solutions for Blancco, a division of Blancco Technology Group. Bringing over 15 years of experience, he previously founded SafeIT Security, a security software company focusing on encryption and selective data erasure. With a keen eye for streamlining corporate IT security efficiencies and maintaining compliance with data privacy legislation, he is often regarded as a trusted advisor among customers. Prior to joining Blancco, he served as a Management Consultant for McKinsey & Company. Having lived and worked in the U.S. and Europe, Forslund understands the operational, financial and cultural nuances of driving global business growth. When he’s not guiding customers through data erasure, or working with Blancco’s internal teams, he can be found speaking at industry conferences, such as Cloud Expo Europe.

Ulrich Fuchs studied physics and informatics at the university of Munich, moving to CERN in 1998 for his thesis. After building the data acquisition for one big CERN experiment he joined the CERN computing department for two years as responsible for the batch computing cluster and data recording. After three years he moved to the ALICE experiment in 2003 as responsible for the then-to-be-built data acquisition installation for this experiment and as senior service manager he is since following its evolution.

Robert is currently VP of Engineering and Chief Architect of Ampool Inc., an early stage start-up in the Big Data and analytics infrastructure space. Before joining Ampool, he worked as an Architect and developer in the solutions/SaaS space at a B2B deep learning based start-up, and prior to that as an Architect and team lead at Pivotal Inc. working in the areas of security and analytics as a service for the Hadoop ecosystem. Robert spent several years in the security space working on and leading teams in at Symantec on distributed intrusion detection systems. His career started with Motorola Labs in Illinois where he worked on distributed IP over wireless systems, security, and e-commerce after graduating from University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana.

Gary Grider is the Leader of the High Performance Computing (HPC) Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory. As Division Leader, Gary is responsible for all aspects of High Performance Computing technologies and deployment at Los Alamos. Additionally, Gary is responsible for managing the R&D portfolio for keeping the new technology pipeline full to provide solutions to problems in the Lab’s HPC environment, through funding of university and industry partners.

Gary is also the US Department of Energy Exascale Storage, IO, and Data Management National Co-Coordinator. In this role, Gary helps managed the US government investments in Data Management, Mass Storage, and IO. Gary has 30 active patents/applications in the data storage area and has been working in HPC and HPC related storage since, 1984.

Dr. Ed Grochowski is a well known speaker on storage technology. He has a 50+ year career association with the computer industry, 41 of which were with IBM. Ed worked at the IBM Almaden Research Center where his interests included hard disk drive evolutionary trends. He extended these interests to memory and storage technologies as SSD and NVM devices. Ed’s charts are frequently used to describe storage technology progress by numerous industry presenters at many conferences. He holds twelve patents and has authored and presented numerous articles on HDD, Flash memory and NVM technologies. He holds a PhD. from New York University. Ed served as Executive Director of DISKCON and the Symposium series for many years. He was a long time coordinator of the 4K-byte sector standards committee, and is a member of the IEEE. For more information see http://edwgrochowski.com

With over 30 years of storage industry experience in both technical and managerial rolls, Bob Hansen now serves as VP of Systems Architecture for Apeiron Data Systems where he is responsible for SW, HW and scale out applications interface architecture. Bob is also the Managing Director of Kitaro Consulting specializing in storage systems architecture and performance. Before founding Kitaro, Bob served as Technical Director at NetApp where he was responsible for storage HW/FW/SW architecture and strategic planning. He has worked extensively in standards organizations, served as Board Chair for Storage Bridge Bay working group and held technical and managerial positions at Xyratex, Agilent Technologies and HP.

Christopher R. Hertel is a long-haul member of the Samba Team, founder of the jCIFS project, author of "Implementing CIFS: The Common Internet File System", and lead author of Microsoft's official SMB/CIFS protocol specifications. He has been working on Windows Ineroperability since 1989. (...or maybe earlier...who can remember?) Chris is currently a Sw. Dev. Sr. Pr. Eng. at Dell/Compellent.

Eric Hibbard is Hitachi Data Systems’ CTO for Security & Privacy where he leads the Hitachi product-oriented security strategy activities with an emphasis on data and storage security. He is a senior security professional with expertise in information assurance, privacy, storage, cloud computing, eDiscovery, and enterprise ICT. He leverages this expertise and extensive experience in the public and private sectors in leadership roles within the ABA, CSA, INCITS, IEEE, and SNIA. Hibbard currently serves as the ISO editor of ISO/IEC 27040 (Storage security), ISO/IEC 27050 (eDiscovery) and ISO/IEC 17788 (Cloud computing). He speaks internationally and is published. Mr. Hibbard holds a BSCS along with the CISSP-ISSAP, ISSEP, ISSMP, and CISA certifications.

Brandon Hoff, works in the product management team at Broadcom responsible for Technology and Strategy, with 25 years of experience in innovation, RDMA, NVMe, SDN, and cloud technologies to enable customized networking and storage solutions for cloud providers and innovative solutions for enterprise users for storage and networking. Hoff has focused his career on designing, developing, and applying industry-shifting technologies to solving customers’ problems.

One of the top technology evangelists in the IT Industry, Nick Howell has spent 15 years driving multi-million dollar solutions across multiple Fortune 500 companies and implementing new systems from an engineering, architectural, and consultant capacity across many industry verticals including finance, defense, retail & more.

Tim Hudson has been involved in the field of network and system security for more than 20 years. Tim Hudson is CTO and Technical Director at Cryptsoft based in Brisbane, Australia. He provides advice and guidance on security technology design and architecture. Cryptsoft is a sponsor of the OASIS standards body and a core contributor to the Key Management Interoperability Protocol and PKCS11 Technical Committees and a voting member of the SNIA and the SSIF.

Jason Iehl manages a team of solution architects that specialize in solution verticals including partner solutions, such as Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Symantec, VMware, Citrix and many more. He provides industry and technical product training and educates customers on existing and emerging data protection technologies and best practices. Prior to taking the leadership role Jason focused on data protection and backup where he has over 17 years industry experience. Jason is also active member of the Data Protection & Capacity Optimization (DPCO) Committee within SNIA.

Sarah Jelinek is a Senior SW Engineer, at Intel, focused on storage technologies. She has 20 years of experience in storage software and file systems. Her current area of research and development is persistent memory programming, along with design and development of user libraries to enable applications to more easily incorporate persistent memory. Prior to working at Intel Sarah spent 14 years at Sun Microsystems working on the UFS, NFS and ZFS file systems. She has a dual Bachelor of Science degrees in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. She also has a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.

Mark Jones is the current chairman and president of the Fibre Channel Industry Association and the Director of technical marketing and performance for Broadcom Limited Emulex Connectivity Division. Mr. Jones is a thirty-year veteran of the technology industry and has held both engineering and marketing positions at prominent companies in the computing industry.

John F. Kim is Director of Storage Marketing at Mellanox Technologies, where he helps storage customers and vendors benefit from high performance interconnects and RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access). After starting his high tech career in IT helpdesk and network administration, John spent several years on solution marketing, product management, and alliances at enterprise software companies, followed by 12 years creating storage solutions and alliances at NetApp and EMC, before moving to Mellanox. John closely follows the areas of flash, Ethernet, software-defined storage, and converged infrastructure. He has a BA in Economics from Harvard University. Follow him on Twitter: @Tier1Storage

Kurt Kuckein runs the Product Management organization for DDN, as well as having personal responsibility for the WOS Object Storage platform and its road map. He joined DDN in May of 2015. Kurt has 15 years of Storage technology experience with stints in Hardware, Software and End-to-End Solution development and prior to joining DDN worked at EMC, Silicon Graphics, and CGNET.

Currently serving in Product Planning of the Data Center Storage Group, Broadcom, Rick is a 25-year computer/storage business veteran. The bulk of his high-tech career has been spent driving product management and outbound marketing for data storage solutions. Rick has also focused his expertise on high speed interconnects, including SCSI, FC, IB and 10GbE. He has remained active throughout his career in various standards committees, including INCITS T10 and T11, SFF, where he took part in chairing various working groups. Today, Rick serves as the President of the SCSI Trade Association (STA). He earned both a Master’s and Bachelors of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Utah.

Vince has over 25 years of experience in Engineering, concentrating in Virtualization and Storage Architecture/Design/Implementation for the past 14 years. At Pivot3, he is responsible for spear-heading all solution development with the company’s technology partners, as well as development of technical solution deliverables such as white papers, reference architectures, best practice guidelines, performance analysis and solution validations. Prior to joining Pivot3, Vince was a Senior Storage Architect at AdvizeX Technologies.

Michael has more than 15 years of experience in the IT industry ranging from Systems Engineer to IT Director. He is currently the Field CTO at Nexenta and previously served as the Director of Product Management and a Sales Engineer. He received an MBA from Mount Saint Mary's University and has technical certifications from multiple storage and virtualization vendors. He was named as a recipient of the VMware vExpert award the past four years for his work on his blog (thesolutionsarchitect.net), on social media (@mletschin) and in the IT community as a whole.

Haoyuan Li is founder and CEO of Alluxio (formerly Tachyon Nexus). He is also a computer science PhD candidate at AMPLab, UC Berkeley, where he co-created Alluxio, a memory speed virtual distributed storage system. He is a founding committer of Apache Spark. Before the AMPLab, he worked at Conviva and Google. Haoyuan has an MS from Cornell University and a BS from Peking University.

Padmavathy K.M is a Principal Consultant with Wipro Technologies having an overall experience of 18 years in s/w development. Her expertise includes development of Client-Server based applications, Component development and Storage applications. She is a post graduate from University of Madras with a Master's degree in Computer Applications. In her current role, she works in the Product Engineering Services division focused on Technology evaluation & selection, solution architecture, engagement model definition and demonstrations to address customer specific requirements in Enterprise computing & Storage platform. Earlier she had worked on Data migration, storage virtualization & tape virtualization products for various leading storage vendors. Her interest includes SMI-S, storage virtualization, Cloud storage, Bigdata and is a member of SNIA SMI-S core and cloud storage groups.

Sujee Maniyam is a seasoned Big Data practitioner. He teaches and consults in Big Data technologies (Hadoop, Spark, NoSQL and Cloud). He is an open source contributor and author of 'Hadoop illuminated' (an open-source book on Hadoop) and 'HBase Design Patterns'. Sujee is a frequent speaker at various conferences and meetups. He also advises and mentors various firms.

Sujee is a founder and principal at Elephant Scale that specializes in training and consulting around Big Data technologies.

Dennis Martin is the founder and President of Demartek, an analyst organization focused on validation and performance testing of data center products. Demartek has its own IT staff and fully equipped and up-to-date datacenter test laboratory. Its widely recognized published reports cover products and technologies from both well-known vendors and startups such as Brocade, Cisco, Dell, EMC, Emulex, HP, IBM, Intel, NetApp, Nimbus Data, QLogic and others. Demartek is also the source for popular industry references, including its “Storage Interface Comparison” covering every interface used by storage systems and its “SSD Deployment Guide” that explains everything you need to know to deploy flash-based storage systems in the datacenter. Dennis’ commentary “Horses, Buggies and SSDs” is a must-read for getting the long-term view of flash and other non-volatile storage technologies. Earlier this year, Dennis wrote a series of articles for Search Solid State Storage (TechTarget) on “How to write an RFP for an all-flash array” and “Comparing features of all-flash arrays.” He has also written articles on best practices for deploying SSD technologies and analyzing performance claims for all-flash arrays. A 36-year veteran of the technology industry, Dennis was previously a Senior Analyst with Evaluator Group and a marketing and engineering executive with StorageTek. He has been a Microsoft storage MVP since 2005.

When he is not deploying, testing, or speaking about computer technologies, Dennis enjoys playing racquetball.

Sean McGinnis is a software architect and project lead with the Dell Storage group. He focuses on enabling integration of Dell Storage capabilities with external systems to streamline the ease of use and availability of the various Dell storage offerings to meet application needs. Sean is the current Project Team Lead of the Cinder project.

J is an R&D Engineer for the Office of the CTO, Solid State Systems Group, but has a broad and eclectic background of both academic, corporate, and industry experience. He received his Ph.D in Mass Communication Technology from the University of Georgia, before starting 15+ years of his storage career. J has been a fundamental contributor to technologies and solutions such as Cisco’s Unified Ports, Multihop and Dynamic FCoE, and solid state solutions. He is an award-winning public speaker, author, and contributor to industry trade publications. He has been active in industry standards, with membership on the Board of Directors for the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA), Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), and the NVMe Promotor’s Board.

Jay is responsible for Aspera's On Demand product line, providing high-speed transport to, from and across cloud infrastructure and object storage to enable big data applications in the cloud. In his previous role as director of sales engineering, Jay spearheaded the architecture and deployment for numerous Aspera installations in support of complex end-to-end file-based media workflows.

Jay brings over 11 years of experience providing OEM sales, sales engineering, and business development services to technology companies with a focus on Open Source platforms. Prior to joining Aspera, Jay held business development and partner management roles at Novell and SUSE Linux. Jay holds a BS in Engineering from the University of Massachusetts.

Sudhakar Mungamoori is the Vice President, Customer Success and Sales Engineering for Formation Data Systems, a venture-backed company revolutionizing how enterprise data is stored, managed, and delivered.

Sudhakar is an accomplished technology executive and evangelist with a track record of driving large-scale infrastructure and turnaround initiatives. Before joining Formation Data Systems, Sudhakar was employed at eBay Inc. / PayPal where he managed large teams of engineers and was responsible for driving eBay’s technology platform services strategic vision and execution through integration of next-gen architectures in cloud and data technologies.

Sudhakar received his M.S. in Physics from University of Hyderabad, India in 1990. He completed eBay’s Emerging Leadership Program in 2012 and Stanford University’s Executive Management Program in 2014.

Peter Murray is an expert with more than 25 years of experience in testing, implementing and maintaining secure, fast and highly-available networks and applications. Prior to joining Load DynamiX, Peter worked with leading vendors including F5 Networks and Spirent Communications, and was extensively involved with stateful device and network testing products and engagements.

Philippe Nicolas is a recognized storage industry expert with more than 20 years of experience. He’s currently advisor for several companies such Rozo Systems, OpenIO, Infinit, Guardtime and Solix Technologies. Previously, he drove the Industry Strategy at Scality after leading the Product Strategy since 2011. Before, he initiated a P2P dispersed storage software project named KerStor. Previously, he was at Brocade for 2 years as technology evangelist and strategist and spent nearly 10 years at Veritas Software and Symantec in different technology and product roles. Prior 1997, he served various technical positions at SGI and Compaq. He holds an engineering degree in computer sciences from ESI.

In parallel, Philippe started the SNIA Europe France regional committee in 2001, and he served as Chairman for France until February 2010. He was also 2 times board director of the SNIA Europe in 2001-2002 and between 2007 and 2009. He created also 4 SNIA Tutorials around Data Sharing, File Storage, Massive Scalability and Cloud Storage since 2002. He received in 2005 the "Outstanding Service Award", from the SNIA Europe, for his industry and association contribution and he's a founding member of SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative.

He owns 2 famous French Storage blogs (filestorage.blogspot.com and continuousdataprotection.blogspot.com), #1 independent storage blog in France, with 2000+ blogposts and 10+ years of existence. His twitter account is @CDP_FST.

Mr. Zivan Ori is the co-founder and CEO of E8 Storage that provides the next generation of cost-effective rack-scale flash storage for the enterprise and software-defined cloud. Before founding E8 Storage, Zivan held the position of IBM-XIV R&D Manager, being responsible for developing the IBM XIV® high-end, grid-scale storage system, and served as Chief Architect at Stratoscale, a provider of hyper-converged infrastructure.

As a seasoned technological innovator, Zivan worked as the Wi-Fi Driver Architect at Envara Inc. (a fabless semiconductor company acquired by Intel) and as VP R&D at Onigma (an information security solution provider acquired by McAfee).

Zivan Ori holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and an MA in Linguistics (with distinction) from University College London.

Ronald Pagani Jr. serves as principal consultant with Open Technology Partners, LLC, and since 2011, as a member of the SNIA Data Protection and Capacity Optimization committee.

As a consultant and product management leader, Ronald focuses on enterprise use cases and strategy for data storage technologies, Open Source software and cloud infrastructure projects, including OpenStack.

Bob Pothier is a Senior Systems Engineer with Exagrid. Prior to joining Exagrid, Bob spent almost 5 years as a Sr. Systems Engineer with Veeam software and holds several virtualization certifications. Bob's passion for technology is mixed with a technical background which gives him that unique ability to excite and explain. He has been a featured speaker at a variety of industry events such as TechTarget, TechJunction, Angelbeat, local VMUGs, VMware User Conferences, various partner conferences and kickoffs as well as being chosen as a technical resource at trade show booths such as VMworld. Mixing a variety of presentations, whiteboarding and product demonstrations allows Bob the flexibility to reach any audience.

Ibrahim Rahmani is a Director of Product and Solutions Marketing at DataCore. He has over 20 years of storage background and has worked for EMC, Veritas, VMware, and Nimble Storage. He is an experienced presenter, who has presented at VMworld, Symantec Vision, and various storage events. People find his session not only educational, but also entertaining.

Tom has a long career in the computer industry. He started his career at a NJ based mini-computer company, Concurrent Computer Corporation, and ended his tenure in development with Digital Equipment -> Compaq -> HP working in the High Performance Computing Division. After leaving HP, Tom transitioned to his current Field Application role with Chelsio Communications. Tom has a Masters Degree in Computer Science from Monmouth University and a Bachelors Degree in Electrical Engineering from Villanova University.

Thomas Rivera has over 30 years of experience in the storage industry, specializing in file services and data protection technology, and is a Senior Technical Associate, with Hitachi Data Systems. Thomas is also an active member of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), as an elected member of the (SNIA) Board of Directors, and is co-chair of the Data Protection and Capacity Optimization (DPCO) Committee, as well as a member of the Security Technical Working Group, and the Analytics and Big Data Committee.

Tom Sas is the Worldwide Product Marketing Manager for Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s StoreOnce Backup products. Tom is responsible for both the current and future product management aspects of the StoreOnce products. Tom also represents Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s interests in SNIA’s Data Protection and Capacity Optimization Committee.

Tom has been with Hewlett Packard Enterprise for 36 years, 23 of those working with the Nearline automated storage products. Previous to his current position, Tom has provided product management for the Magneto-Optical and Ultra Density Optical Jukebox products as well as Virtual Library Systems, business forecasting and new product introduction coordination for Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Storage Division. Tom has spoken on various storage topics at conferences such as HPE Discover, MER (Managing Electronic Records), ARMA (Association of Records Managers and Administrators), SNW, QStar, and other partner conferences.

Tom has degrees from the University of Northern Colorado and Colorado State University and works out of Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Fort Collins, Colorado office.

Osamu Shimizu is a research engineer at the Recording Media Research Laboratories, FUJIFILM Corporation, where he specializes in magnetic recording technologies. His current interest is the development of high-capacity magnetic tape media with barium ferrite particles. He is an expert member of the Technical Committee of Magnetic Recording & Information Storage at The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers. He is also a Senior Member of IEEE. He has published dozens of papers in international journals and conference proceedings on magnetism and/or magnetic recording technologies. He was awarded the Pat Goldberg Best Paper Award for 2011 for the publication of “29.5-Gb/in2 Recording Areal Density on Barium Ferrite Tape.” He received his B.E. and M.E. degrees in Material Science from the University of Electro Communications and a Ph.D. degree from Ibaraki University.

In Shin is a founder and CEO of G-Cube Inc. He is a storage system architect with more than 10 years of experience in storage system research and development. He did various R&D projects in in-kernel I/O stack, disk drives, distributed storage system, and non-volatile memory storage system.

Currently, his interest includes cloud storage, especially focusing on object-based storage technology. He received his Ph.D in Computer Science Engineering from Seoul Nation University.

With more than 20 years in operations and leadership roles with growth companies, David serves as chief technology officer (CTO) of DataGravity, responsible for leading the technical strategic vision for the company while guiding product management teams and research and development efforts to better serve the needs of organizations looking for more from their data storage.

Prior to becoming CTO, David served as vice president of worldwide field operations at DataGravity. Previously, David was a member of the senior leadership team at Veeam Software, a leading data protection software provider for virtualized and cloud environments.

David also served as CTO and vice president of professional services for systems integrator Hipskind TSG. He also served as CTO for Kane County, Ill., and has held technology leadership roles with various organizations. A graduate of DeVry University, he is a frequent speaker at top-tier technology shows and is a recognized expert in virtualization.

Radhakrishna Singuru is a Principal Architect with Wipro Technologies having 20 years of professional experience in software development with expertise in architecting, designing, implementing projects involving low level platform work to high level application programming. He has hands on experience working in projects in varied areas ranging from Cloud and Virtualization Technologies, Software Defined Networking, Security, next gen firewalls, software load balancers, analytic platforms, network routing protocol stacks, L2/L3 switching and stacking software, network processors, network aggregators and network device drivers. He is a Certified TOGAF 9 Enterprise Architect and Certified Azure Solution Architect. He is a post graduate in Technology from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur.

Eric is a technology writer and Sr. Analyst with Evaluator Group with over 25 years of experience in high-tech industries. He’s held technical management and marketing positions in the computer storage, instrumentation, digital imaging and test equipment fields. He has spent the past 15 years in the data storage field, with storage hardware manufacturers and as a national storage integrator, designing and implementing open systems storage solutions for companies in the Western United States. Eric earned degrees in electrical/computer engineering from the University of Colorado and marketing from California State University, Humboldt. He lives in Colorado with his wife and twenty-something twins.

Scott Sobhani, CEO and cofounder of Cloud Constellation Corporation and the SpaceBelt, Information Ultra-Highway is an experienced telecom executive with over 25 years in executive management positions, most recent as VP for business development and commercial affairs at International Telecom Advisory Group (ITAG). Previous positions include CEO of TalkBox, VP & GM at Lockheed Martin, and VP, GM & senior economist at Hughes Electronics Corporation. Mr. Sobhani was responsible for closing over $2.3 billion in competitive new business orders for satellite spacecraft systems, mobile network equipment and rocket launch vehicles. He co-authored “Sky Cloud Autonomous Electronic Data Storage and Information Delivery Network System”, “Space-Based Electronic Data Storage and Network System” and “Intermediary Satellite Network for Cross-Strapping and Local Network Decongestion” (each of which are patent pending). He has an MBA from the University of Southern California, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Chaz Stevens is currently the Marketing Director for Aberdeen LLC, a leading manufacturer of custom servers and storage for over 25 years. Delivering exceptional performance, unparalleled reliability and outstanding value, Aberdeen’s award winning products are deployed every day by IT departments in many of the world’s largest organizations.

Dr. Robert Thibadeau pioneered self-encrypting drives during his tenure as Chief Technologist of Seagate Technology, LLC from 2002-2009. He has also served as the Chair of the Storage Workgroup in the Trusted Computing Group. Dr. Thibadeau was also the founding director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University from 1980-2008.

Jim Thompson is a Senior Systems Engineer at Avere Systems. With over 25 years of expertise in the enterprise IT sector, he has held engineering roles at companies including Spinnaker Networks, Hitachi and Nimble. A frequent industry speaker, Jim can provide a unique perspective on cloud bursting, as well as an in-depth look into some of its important use cases.

Laz Vekiarides is the CTO and co-founder of ClearSky Data, an enterprise storage company that simplifies the entire data lifecycle as a managed service and recently raised $27 million in a Series B investment round. Most recently, he served as the Executive Director of Software Engineering for Dell’s EqualLogic Storage Engineering group, where he led the development of numerous storage innovations and established the EqualLogic product line as a leader in host OS and hypervisor integration. Laz joined Dell from EqualLogic, which was acquired in early 2008, where he was a member of the core leadership team – playing a key role in the company’s early success as a Senior Engineering Manager and Architect for the PS Series SAN arrays and host tools. He holds several storage technology patents, as well as a BSEE from Northeastern University, and an MSCS from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Shaun Walsh brings more than 30 years of marketing experience in the IT software, cloud, telco, networking and storage industries. Shaun is focused on business development and industry research and is the creator of G2M Systems™ and Methodologies as well as G2M Buzz Market™ industry reports.

Mr. Walsh is an active industry speaker and media contributor of thought provoking and visionary content related to next generation cloud computing, IT infrastructure, strategic OEM and channel developments, and corporate and social media communications programs. With the unique ability to craft a story that can explain complex technical concepts in a relatable manner, Mr. Walsh’s storyweaving is able to maintain readers/listeners’ interest and engagement.

His experience as a member of the executive staff at several companies enables him to understand the competing demands of sales, marketing, investor relations, product management, research and development and what is needed to support the long-term strategic plans of an organization. Mr. Walsh excels in strategic planning, increasing revenue, developing and expanding markets, and digital, social media and SEO marketing techniques.

Dr. Willett has worked throughout his career in the areas of security and privacy: university research faculty, IBM Cryptographic Center, Fiderus, Seagate Research, and Wave Systems. At Seagate, he was a member of the small team that invented and developed the Trusted Drive concept (including self-encrypting drives (SED)), later standardized through the Trusted Computing Group, with Seagate leadership. As a sought-after consultant, Dr. Willett worked with Samsung to guarantee that Samsung developed the first SSD SED; now, all Samsung client SSDs are SEDs. Lately, Dr. Willett has worked with Dr. Bob Thibadeau (the inventor of SEDs) to promote the adoption of client SEDs in the marketplace through Bright Plaza and the newly-created Drive Trust Alliance, in cooperation with (Tom) Coughlin Associates.

Gen Xu is a performance engineer at Intel’s Software and Service Group. Gen has been working in the area of distributed storage cluster modeling and simulation, specifically object storage Swift. He has rich experience in performance optimization of storage systems. Gen hold an M.S. in Computer Science from East China Normal University in China.

Farid Yavari is the Vice President of Technology at FalconStor software. Farid's decades of experience in high tech industry includes technology leadership in hyper-scale storage solutions and developing strategy and vision for enterprise class data center deployments at scale. Prior to FalconStor, Farid was a senior member of eBay’s data center infrastructure team working closely with the storage industry to drive innovation, and worked with industry leaders to shape the future of the storage technology. Over the years, Farid has been actively sharing his views and experience with his peers and the high tech industry by participating in various speaking engagements at universities and industry forums.

Brian Zahnstecher is the Principal of PowerRox, where he focuses on power design, integration, system applications, and OEM market penetration for power electronics. He has successfully handled assignments in system design/architecting, AC/DC front-end power, embedded solutions, processor power, and digital power solutions for a variety of clients. He previously held positions in power electronics with industry leaders Emerson Network Power, Cisco, and Hewlett-Packard, where he advised on best practices, oversaw product development, managed international teams, created/enhanced optimal workflows and test procedures, and designed and optimized voltage regulators. He has been a regular contributor to the industry as an invited speaker, author, workshop participant, session host, roundtable moderator, and volunteer. He has over 12 years of industry experience and holds Master of Engineering and Bachelor of Science degrees from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

PowerRox is a consultancy dedicated to solving power problems for those seeking to establish or enhance their position in the enterprise power electronics marketplace. We specialize in making power solutions more reliable, more efficient, less expensive, and more capable. We can solve problems in power supply design, power system development, system debug and test, cost/performance analysis, marketing, and re-design. We are committed to meeting all deadlines, performing on-budget, debugging/testing solutions to required levels, and doing the highest quality work possible.